I Am Zeus

The balcony trembled beneath his grip.

Zeus stood motionless, eyes fixed on the battlefield below where his children and elders tore themselves bloody to hold Olympus. His storm screamed inside him, begging for release, but he forced it down. His veins burned, his heart hammered, and the marble cracked under his fingers.

Then a voice broke the silence.

"So this is what the King of Olympus does? Stand on his balcony and watch while his children fight his war?"

Zeus did not turn. The voice was sharp, amused, laced with something older than scorn.

"It is harder than you think," Zeus said quietly, his eyes never leaving the chaos below. "To hold back. To wait. To choose the moment."

The voice chuckled. "Harder? No. Wrong. You are Zeus. You are not a thinker. You are a storm. Your wife thinks, your daughter thinks. That's what you bred them for. You? You fight."

The words cut deep, because they were true.

"You have a wife that thinks all the time," the voice continued. "You made a daughter who thinks the same but still takes action. Athena is both of you—Metis and Zeus in one. But you? You are not the thinker. You are the fist. The thunder. So stop standing there like marble and be what you are. Fight for them. Make them remember why you are their father."

Zeus's jaw tightened. His storm pulsed against his ribs, louder, heavier. He looked down again, this time not at the war as a whole, but at faces.

Athena. She stood at the center, her spear weaving like a loom, stitching order out of madness. Her voice carried through the din, her orders cutting sharper than steel. She was the mind of Olympus, steady, brilliant—just like Metis. But she was also him. She did not only command. She fought, her spear thrusting, cutting, spilling blood with each word. She was thought and thunder fused.

Zeus's chest stirred with pride. She was theirs—his and Metis's.

Then his eyes found Ares. His son roared through the battlefield like wildfire, Surtr's flames still licking from his blade, his laughter shaking the mountains. Reckless, savage, but unbreakable. Ares was the heart of war itself, the ferocity Zeus knew well in his own blood.

He looked further—Apollo's fire blazing, Artemis's silver shafts singing through the night, Hermes scattering Erebus's shadows with speed and wit. They were all fighting with everything they had. Fighting because they believed he was watching. Because they believed when the moment came, he would move.

And they were right.

A soft step came behind him. The voice of another, gentler but no less sharp.

"Lucifer is right."

Zeus turned at last. Metis stood there, her eyes calm, piercing, unshaken even as the mountain shook around them. She reached out, her hand pressing against his chest where the storm burned.

"Go," she said. "I will do the thinking for you. I always have. But you—you are the storm. You are the blade. Let me carry the plan. You carry the fury."

For a moment, Zeus only stared at her. The storm inside him pressed harder, surging, breaking against the cage he had built. Then, slowly, he smiled.

The storm broke.

Lightning tore across the sky, splitting the clouds in veins of white and blue. Thunder rolled so loud it drowned the roars of monsters. Every god on the battlefield froze, heads snapping upward as the heavens themselves opened.

Zeus stepped off the balcony.

He fell like thunder.

The moment his feet struck the ground, the battlefield erupted. The marble cracked, the shadows shrieked, Tiamat's brood faltered. The very air bent under his aura. His children looked up, their eyes wide, and in them he saw the truth. They had been waiting for this. Waiting for him.

He raised his hand. Lightning speared from the heavens, not bolts, but pillars, entire rivers of thunder cascading down into Erebus's shadows. The wraiths screamed as their forms shredded, burned into ash by the sheer weight of his storm.

"Father," Ares roared, his grin feral, "about damn time!"

Zeus only bared his teeth. He surged forward, his body flickering with light, moving faster than Hermes's streaks. He tore through shadow like it was smoke, his fists shattering wraiths apart before their claws could even touch him.

Erebus reeled, his void form rippling under the onslaught. His voice thundered. "So you finally move, storm-king."

Zeus's answer was a blow—his fist crashing into the void, lightning detonating inside Erebus's chest. The darkness shattered outward, waves of black and white colliding, rattling the entire mountain.

Beside him, his children surged. Athena struck with renewed fire, her spear glowing brighter as her father's storm fueled it. Ares roared louder, his blade burning higher, cutting through shadows as if Olympus itself burned in his hand.

Apollo loosed an arrow, his sunfire amplified by the storm above, splitting into a thousand spears of flame. Artemis answered with silver shafts that curved into those same flames, twin lights spiraling through the swarm and detonating together in an explosion of gold and silver across the sky.

Hermes raced into the chaos, his speed doubled by the crackling thunder in the air. He was everywhere at once, blades flashing, his laughter ringing sharp as he cut Erebus's shadows into ribbons.

Behind them, Gaia raised mountains with one sweep of her arm, her roots piercing serpents and pinning them for Ares's blade. Rhea's spires of Titan-fire struck alongside Apollo's arrows, their light joining into one blinding beam that burned through three of Tiamat's heads at once. Oceanus crashed forward in a wave so vast it swallowed the tide whole, his trident spearing into Tiamat's chest as her remaining heads shrieked.

Themis's scales glowed brightest now, her law binding tighter with every strike Zeus landed. Erebus's shadows bent, weakened, scattered, unable to disobey the storm and the law at once.

Tiamat shrieked in fury, her five heads spewing chaos together—fire, ice, venom, thunder, scream. But Zeus raised both hands, and the storm crowned him. The lightning swallowed her screams. Thunder drowned her roar. Her brood faltered, burned, frozen, shattered by the sky itself.

Erebus staggered, his void form shrinking under the storm's endless barrage. "You… are not a god," he hissed, shadows clawing desperately. "You are a mistake."

Zeus's eyes burned like the sky. "I am their father."

He struck again.

The battlefield lit like day. The fury of the gods had entered. Olympus roared alive, their storm unleashed, their blood united.

And the Primordials knew then—they were no longer fighting sparks.

They were fighting the storm.